ask zompist

Events in the Ukraine had me wondering about fascism, and I remembered your essay on Bush. I went back to it, and read through nearly all of Neiwert’s essay you linked. It’s interesting to read material a decade on from those events leading up to the invasion of Iraq. It was a different time.

Both your piece and Neiwert’s extended essay haven’t aged very well, no offense. We know Bush fizzled out as Iraq devolved into genocidal bloodletting and he lost serious alignment with the far right wing before the end of his second term. Frankly, coming from the extreme right background I have, I was never very worried about a Bush dictatorship. I guess my reasoning was something like, all my childhood I’d heard horror stories of how Clinton was going to hold onto office, and now as a much more liberal adult, I couldn’t put any weight to the liberal fears of a similar thing happening with Bush.

Anyway, we know Bush let his hubris and idiocy destroy the right tidal wave. But how do you view the danger of right-wing American fascism today?

It’s been 6 years of increasingly bizarre conservative extremism. It’s been easy to pass off as racists and old people, but Neiwert’s essay in particular has me wondering if this is mistaken. Certainly, it’s hard to downplay the real world successes of the extreme fringe, and the rightward track of the Republican Party is hard to ignore. And the fact that Tea Partiers and militia men are still around suggest to me that this isn’t as fringe as we on the liberal side of things would like to believe.

The question of marginalization is seemingly obvious, but by 2016 there will have been 8 years of contentious Democratic rule, an economy that hasn’t fully recovered, potentially unpopular wars in Syria and Iraq, a devolving (and increasingly fascist) climate in Europe, and the potential for a Clinton candidacy. These are all things which could push the electorate towards the GOP.

Is that GOP more likely to move further along Paxton’s five steps of fascist movements than with Bush? Violence was the missing piece for both you and Neiwert, and that hasn’t exactly changed, but a lot else seemingly has.

—Matthew

I think you’ve put your finger on a paradox: the right has become crazier and crazier, and yet the threat to democracy seems less. There were some worrying moments in 2009— wingnuts fantasizing about military coups or assassinations. But they turned their attention to winning the House in 2010.

So, the basic answer to why they haven’t turned to violence is that they haven’t needed to. They have the House and a good chance at picking up the Sentate this year. They have 29 Republican state governors, 28 state legislatures, and 5 of 9 Supreme Court justices. They can’t get everything they want, but they can bust unions, shut down abortion clinics, punish the electorate with austerity measures, stop gun laws, restrict voting rights, and obstruct a liberal agenda in Congress.

As you say, times change— ten years ago they not only held the whole federal government, but it seemed (to them and to their enemies) as if they might be settling in for a long haul of governing. But the demographics, and their own zealotry, makes that seem less and less likely. Their message is out of date and they’ve systematically outraged every constituency but straight, old, white, Christian males. And yet there’s nothing pushing them to change in the short term. I don’t see how they can continue on this path for twenty more years… but they can easily keep going as they are for five or ten years.

I’m not too worried about the other things you mention. I don’t think Obama has any intention of restarting the war in Iraq. European politics never affects the US. And though a Clinton presidency looked in 2008 like it would be horribly contentious, well, that’s business as usual today.

But 2016 will be interesting. The GOP generally nominates the most centrist guy they can find— though they hate themselves for doing it. But do they have any non-crazies left?

Edit: Forgot to add that though the vehemence of the extreme right always seems surprising, actually it’s been that way forever. You can easily recognize the Tea Party and the birthers in Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics“.

Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

I read an article on New Scientist [link requires free registration] a couple of days ago about programming languages. The writer thinks most of them were poorly designed, that is, hard to learn, hard to use, and difficult to debug. He said that there were about 15 to 50 errors per thousand lines of code, and huge systems like Windows accumulated masses of them. “As more and more of the world is digitised”, the problem will get worse, with the potential for fatal accidents in areas such as aviation, medicine, or traffic. One solution is “user-friendly languages” which let the programmer see what they do “in real time as they tinker with the code”. Another is to design programs that write themselves, based on google searches.

So I’ve got a couple of questions for the guru.

One, what is your opinion of the article, the problem, and the suggested solutions, as an expert?

And for my second question, what qualities make a programming language good or bad? Can you rank the languages you’ve used in order of usefulness? Or is that a pointless endeavor? Are there any which are stellar, or any which you wouldn’t advise anyone to mess with?

—Mornche

The article is a bit misleading, I think. Brooks gives some examples of geeks trashing computer languages, but it should be understood that the geek statement “X IS TOTAL SHIT IT SHOULD DIE IN A FIRE” just means “X was about 95% what I like, but the rest disappointed me.”

Like any geek, I love the opportunity to trot out my opinions on languages. When I was a lad, Basic was supposed to be easy, so everyone learned it. It’s total shit and should die in a fire. That is, it was disappointing. The early versions gave people some very bad habits, such as not naming variables, using numeric labels, and GOTOing all over the place— most of these things are fixed now. Fortran is honestly little better; Cobol adds tedium for no good reason. A lot of modern languages— C, C++, C#, Java, Javascript— are surprisingly similar, and inherit their basic conventions from Pascal. I liked Pascal a lot (haven’t seen a compiler for it in twenty years), and I like C# almost as much. I haven’t used Ruby or Python, but looking briefly at code snippets, they look a lot like (cleaned-up modern) Basic. An experienced programmer can always learn a new language, and how crappy their programs are depends on them, not the language.

There are, of course, lots of little stupidities that have caused me a lot of problems. To take one at random, C uses = and == with different meanings, and it perversely uses == for simple equality. Pascal got this right. There are also amazingly clever bits in languages that I’d hate to do without (data hiding, for instance).

One thing the article misses is that what’s really a pain to learn is not the mechanics of the language, but the libraries and UI frameworks. The C family and Java are very similar, but the libraries aren’t, and that’s what will take you months to pick up. (Unless you use .NET, which is designed to use the same library across multiple languages, so the languages themselves become a set of syntactic skins you can pick by personal preference.)

Programmers have realized before how tedious and error-prone their work is, and there have been many attempts to help, including:

Smarter development environments, like Visual Studio. These take care of indenting for you, they’ll check for mismatched braces and such, keywords are highlighted. You can rename a variable program-wide, or break out a section of code as a separate routine, or insert commonly used code fragments, with one command. This not only saves time, but keeps you from making common errors.

New paradigms— as when we switched from procedural to object-oriented programming about twenty years ago, or to Agile about ten years ago. When you’re in your 20s you get really excited about these revolutions. Crusty middle-aged people like me are a little more jaded— these methodological changes never quite live up to the hype, especially as they don’t address the management problems identified fifty years ago by Frederick Brooks: too much pressure to make impossible deadlines with inadequate tools. (Which isn’t to say change is bad. Object-oriented programming was an improvement, partly because it allowed much better code re-use, and partly because if it’s done right, routines are much shorter, and shorter code is more likely to work. But good lord, I’ve seen some horrifying OO code.)

Higher levels of abstraction. This is largely what the New Scientist article is talking about. Earlier forms of the idea include specialized string processing languages (Snobol), simulation languages (Simula), and database specs (SQL). When I was doing insurance rating, I created an insurance rating language. Someone always has a vision of programming by moving colored blocks around or something.

A lot of programming is incredibly repetitive; all programmers recognize this. The bad programmer addresses it by copying and pasting code, so his programs consist of endless swaths of similar-but-confusingly-different routines. The good programmer addresses it by abstraction: ruthlessly isolating the common elements, handling common problems the same way (ideally with the same code), making UI elements consistent, moving as much detailed behavior as possible out of the code itself into high-level specifications. All the libraries I mentioned are just earlier programmers’ prepackaged solutions to common problems.

Often the idea is to come up with something so powerful and easy to use that it can be given to the business analyst to do. (that is, the non-programmer who’s telling the programmer how the real-world thing works). This usually doesn’t work, because

the programmer’s idea of “easy” is not that of ordinary people, so the business analyst can’t really use the tools.

most people don’t have the programmer’s most important learned skill: understanding that computers have be told everything. Ordinary humans think contextually: you remember special case Y when Y comes up. Programs can’t work like that– someone has to remember Y, and code for it, long before Y happens.

The reason that programming takes so long, and is so error-prone, is that no one can work out that everything all at once, in advance. The business analyst suddenly remembers something that only happens every two years on a full moon, the salesman rushes in with a new must-have feature, the other guy’s system doesn’t work like his API says, field XYZ has to work subtly differently from field WXZ, we suddenly discover that what you just wrote to the database isn’t in the database, no one ever ran the program with real data. Abstraction in itself will not solve these problems, and often it introduces new problems of its own— e.g. the standardized solution provided by your abstraction vendor doesn’t quite work, so you need a way to nudge it in a different direction…

Again, I don’t mean to be too cynical. When it’s done well, code generators are things of beauty— and they also don’t look much like code generators, because they’re designed for the people who want to solve a particular problem, not for coders. An example is the lovely map editing tool Valve created for Portal 2. It allows gamers who know nothing about code or 3-d modeling to create complicated custom maps for the game. Many games have modding tools, but few are so beautifully done and so genuinely easy.

But I’m skeptical that a general-purpose code generation tool is possible. One guy wants something Excel-like… well, he’s right that Excel is a very nice and very powerful code generator for messing with numbers. If you try using it for anything more complicated, it’s a thing of horror. (I’ve seen Excel files that attempt to be an entire program. Once it’s on multiple worksheets, it’s no longer possible to follow the logic, and fixing or modifying it is nearly impossible.)

The other guys wants to “allow a coder to work as if everything they need is in front of them on a desk”. I’m sure you could do some simple programs that way, but you’re not going to be able to make the sort of programs described earlier— an aircraft software suite, or Microsoft Word. You cannot put all the elements you need on one desktop. Big programs are, as the author notes, several million lines of code. If it’s well written, that probably means about 40,000 separate functions. No one can even understand the purposes of those 40,000 functions— it takes a team of dozens of programmers. Ideally there’s a pretty diagram of the architecture that does fit on a page, but it’s a teaching abstraction, far less useful— and less accurate— than an architect’s plan of a house. (Also the diagram is about two years out of date, because if there’s anything programmers hate more than other people’s programming languages, it’s documentation.)

So, in short, programmers are always building tools to abstract up from mere code, but I expect the most useful ones to be very domain-specific. Also, lots of them will be almost as awful as code, because most programmers are allergic to usability.

Plus, read this. It may not be enlightening but it should be entertaining.

In less than six hours from the time I type this, if Congress cannot get its act together (which at this point is seeming certain), the goverment will go into shutdown. What do you think will happen next, both immediately and over the next few election cycles? Do you think the GOP will have the cojones to force default?

—Campbell

In brief, get ready for doom.

The Republicans apparently didn’t watch Saturday morning cartoons, so they never saw Schoolhouse Rock and never learned how a bill gets passed. So they’ve had the crazy idea that whatever they pass in the House will somehow become law— thus the 40 motions to repeal Obamacare. And then, because they can never get crazy enough, they got it into their heads that the Senate and Obama would go along with an attempt to get rid of Obamacare— after they lost the election and lost the Supreme Court case.

The shutdown, stupid and nasty and wasteful as it is, is nothing to the next bit: defaulting on the debt, which comes in about two weeks. Again, they’ve convinced themselves that they have leverage— that they can get Obama to enact Mitt Romney’s entire agenda, and more, in return for… nothing.

The thing is, when you ask for the moon, you have to be willing to provide somethingin return. And “not kill the economy” is not providing something. Defaulting on the US government’s obligations would be a suicidal move that would bring back another recession, or worse. Needless to say, it doesn’t bring about the beautiful libertarian dystopia they dream of. It doesn’t even get rid of Obamacare— that’s classified as an entitlement, like Social Security, which is why it’s continuing now during the shutdown.

For five years, anytime they’ve actually wanted to negotiate, Obama’s office door has been open. Too open, really. But to negotiate you have to be willing to give the other side some of what it wants, and for five years they’ve thought that they could skip this part.

The grand thing is, the base actually seems eager for a default. They think it’ll be fine! After all, “raising the debt ceiling” sounds like a bad thing— voters don’t really understand it, so many of them are against it, though they might not agree if you asked them directly “Should the executive branch refuse to spend the money Congress told it to?”

In 2011 Obama was eager for a long-term deficit-reducing deal, so he stupidly made some concessions on the debt ceiling thing. That only emboldens the GOP now. Obama seems to have wised up; he says he won’t offer any concessions in return for Congress doing its job. And he has said, correctly, that if he gives in on this, it’s the end of majority government in this country. They’d just increase their demands with each debt crisis. And why would a future Democratic House play nice with a future Republican president?

So, will they do it? I’m afraid they will. They’re revolutionaries and nihilists; they don’t care what happens. No one they care about is telling them not to do it.

The problem is, they have no exit strategy. Boehner is terrified of losing his job, so he went along with a plan he knew wouldn’t work. The Tea Party has worked itself into such a lather that it’s not going to go quickly to any sort of reasonable solution.

Normally at this point, you’d expect the grownups to step in and tell them to cool it. But they’ve spent the last twenty years throwing out the grownups— there’s a moderate caucus, but it hasn’t even got the 25 votes required to get a vote on the Senate bill. The more moderate national figures like McCain and Romney, who think the defunding moves are a terrible idea, have no influence on the House.

The money guys— Wall Street, the 1%— is going to get terrified at some point. Most of them are not crazed Tea Partiers— they don’t want to trash the government or destroy its credit rating. But they have very little leverage with the Tea Party either. If they lean on anyone, it’ll be John Boehner— and Boehner can’t control his own party.

Now, the last few crises have ended with a deal at, or a few days after, the deadline. So the most likely case is that around Oct. 20, a deal come through that keeps spending levels about where they are, funds Obamacare, raises the debt ceiling, and contains some kind of sweetener so Boehner can claim victory.

At any point Boehner could end the crisis by allowing a vote on the Senate bill. But he’d face a Tea Party revolt, so he’s not going to put his job on the line for a continuing resolution. For a deal that punts the problem for another year, maybe.

The worse case, and a series of steadily worsening cases, is that it takes the House a couple months after shutdown and default to realize that they’re not getting anything, and then they make a deal.

The Democrats, of course, are betting that the country will (very rightly) blame the GOP for the crisis, and for any pain that results. So far they’ve been very firm; it’s the GOP that’s showing itself full of holes.

Andrew Sullivan’s blog, the Dish, is good for getting a handle on what all the pundits are saying. Crazier scenarios than the ones I’ve outlined are possible, and no one knows what will happen, except that it’ll be bad.

In the long term, as I’ve said before, demographics are against the GOP… to mention just one state, Texas may well go back to the Democratic column within ten years. Relying exclusively on old white rural straight Christian non-Northerners is a losing strategy, if not in 2016, definitely in 2026.

The problem is, again, the craziness has no exit strategy. There is no mechanism for moderation in the party— quite the reverse, the primary system (and the very well-organized grassroots) keeps dragging the party more to the right. The public and the media may be pissed at the House Republicans right now— but their districts aren’t rebelling.

Juan Linz, who died yesterday, was a political theorist who mostly studied Latin America; his major thesis was that presidential systems just don’t work as well as parliamentary systems— because they have multiple concentrations of power each with electoral legitimacy, and there is no way to end the standoff. For years the major challenge to his theory was the two-century history of the US. It’s beginning to look like Linz was right after all. He suggested that the US avoided the trap because its parties were broad coalitions, too loose to create real gridlock. Well, the GOP has spent thirty years becoming an ideological monolith dedicated to opposing the Democrats at all costs. So the worst case is, the GOP causes a depression and forces a collapse of the American governmental system.

In your recent post, you noted that the (first) world is moving to a frivolity/art economy. What will that mean for employment? After all, robots are making our cars and, increasingly, our burgers— and, like it or not, those are jobs that in the past were filled by regular people whose natural talents were in menial work. Not everybody has the talent or desire to spend their time writing novels or direct avant-garde movies…and that’s OK; people shouldn’t be cut out of an economy because of their natural skill set. What will that mean for employment or the economy? It seems unrealistic to give everybody a $30k/year minimum income, for example, as I’ve seen suggested; that seems fiscally undoable.

—dhok

There’s a grim meathook future answer and a nice answer, depending on whether we follow our current plutocratic path or not.

But first I’d just note that your question seems rather regressive. It’s like Aldous Huxley assuming that the future must include a huge population of subhuman menials. Dumb repetitive work is what machines do very well; those jobs just disappear.

The grim meathook answer is what’s happening today: lots of low-paid service work— call center employees, Wal-Mart greeters, nannies, waiters, nursing home attendants, home sales party presenters, bodyguards, flight attendants, SEO farm writers. What humans do better than robots, for the indefinite future, is deal with other humans. We need and value human contact, and anyway most of these jobs, even if they’re not exciting, require a generalist. Humans deal well with the moderately unexpected.

Or to put it another way, automation targets expensive, repetitive jobs. When you get rid of the $40/hour factory jobs, you have a large population that is forced to take $10/hour service jobs. Even for Mr. Scrooge it’s not worth bothering to replace those jobs.

In the more optimistic future, we use the increased productivity that automation brings to improve everyone‘s life. That’s what even the curmudgeonly old USA did in the liberal era, so it’s not unthinkable. Poverty used to be universal; in mid-century America the vast majority were middle class; an even richer society could, if it chose, eliminate poverty entirely. (That “we’ll always have poverty” is a myth to comfort the 1%. We could end absolute poverty globally for a surprisingly small sum.)

I don’t think anyone has ambitions limited to factory work or bagging groceries. Everyone has some dream that they’d love to be paid to do. In our economic system, maybe it’s too silly or specialized to pay well, but a world where the robots do all the heavy lifting is one where everyone can be a specialist or a frivolist.

But even in the more ideal world, it remains true that humans are better at making other humans happy. When you’re 94, you probably don’t want to be surrounded only by robots. So ‘elder care’ is still a human niche, but it’s seen as valuable rather than degrading and paid enough to make it attractive.

The SEO writer may not exist in the happier future, but only because he’ll be doing something far weirder. In the Incatena, rather than a thousand different jobs with a million people in each— a situation that may be automatable— there’s a million different jobs with a a thousand people in each.

You propose in one of your blog posts that one of the best ways to reform education would be to get away for the old idea of standardized curricula and move towards more specialized, individual education— i.e. if you have a kid with no talent for math, you shouldn’t put him through calculus.

But is this really wise? C. S. Lewis makes the argument in The Abolition of Man that one of the primary roles of a good education is to preserve democracy (and goes on to note that the sort of education that will preserve a democracy is not necessarily one that democrats will like).

Don’t we have an obligation to students’ countrymen, and not just their employers, to make sure that they not only have the skills required to do their job, but also have a firm grounding in (at the very least) scientific thinking, Western history, mathematics, and (going further) a foreign language, the classics, philosophy and logic?

—Campbell

The main thrust of my proposal wasn’t to do less education, but more! The point is that most kids learn very little in school. I think the twin ideas of learning by doing, and studying what interests them, will make them learn far more.

The insufficiently examined assumption in your question— and in most discussions of education— is that kids learning, which is hard to make happen and hard to measure, is replaced with adults lecturing, which we know how to do. (Standardized tests pretend to measure progress, but every schoolchild knows that what you know on the day of the test has very little to do with what you know a week later, to say nothing of ten or twenty years!)

To take one of the items on your list— sure, I think it’s great for kids to learn mathematics. But it’s complete illusion that forcing kids to sit through a math class makes them learn mathematics! It works for a fraction of kids, but even they would probably learn better another way.

Now, why do we learn mathematics? Because it’s useful in all sorts of fields. That means it’ll come up naturally if you let kids pursue those subjects. For some, they’ll have to learn it if they want to write a 3-D graphics program, or plot a spaceship’s trajectory, or calculate whether a roof will cave in Others might run into it while trying to run a business, or argue a political point, or figure out sports statistics, or understand the way musical scales work.

Now, it does seem true that what adults should really know, kids may be regrettably uninterested in. E.g. surely we’d like voters to have a basic understanding of government. But again, the question is how to produce this knowledge? The required constitution class I mentioned just doesn’t do it. I think kids of the same age would learn a lot more if, say, they spent a year creating their own government, with multiple branches, elections, and a measure of real power over the school.

I’ll understand if you don’t take this question seriously; I realize it sounds kind of silly, but I promise that I would not waste your time with a frivolous question.

What I wonder is, how does a person know if he or she is stupid? It seems like the more a person knows, the more they realize they don’t know— and, conversely, with decreased knowledge comes a weaker sense of one’s limitations. For all I know, I could be a complete idiot, and never realize it because I’m too stupid to do so.

—Tim Klausewitz

No need to apologize; it’s a good question and lets me bring in the Dunning-Kruger effect, which allows us to detect and kill replicants. Er, which tells us that while competent people are pretty good at estimating how competent they are, incompetent people wildly overestimate their skills. E.g. in tests of four skills, those scoring in the bottom quartile (thus, averaging at the 12.5 percentile) estimated that they were in the 62nd percentile (i.e. well above average).

So the bad news is, yes, if you’re stupid you probably don’t know it. But then the good news is, if you really wonder, you’re probably not.

I suspect you know how well you do on tests and your job. I was always one of the top kids in my class, through high school; then I went to a good university where everyone was smart, and that cured me of any worries that I was a genius. For what the real geniuses are like, I recommend Richard Feynman’s memoir, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”. Not only is it fun to read, it shows how a smart person approaches the world, and shows how he compared himself to even smarter people, such as Niels Bohr and Einstein.

To some extent, intelligence isn’t even the main thing. As momentum is mass times velocity, I think great minds have a quality that’s used with intelligence and multiplies it. Or several different qualities. Some people just have so much energy that they can crack a problem by direct hard work. Some are particularly gifted at finding lateral solutions. Some partner with someone else whose strengths and limitations complement theirs. So even if you conclude that you’re no genius, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re limited.

I posted this link on my Facebook page, and one of my friends commented:

“This was written in 2000. In the wake of the sub-prime mortgage fiasco,
TARP, the looming collapse of the euro, staggering debt and inverted-
pyramid demographics throughout the first world, I wonder if he still stands by this analysis?”

and I thought… why not ask you?

—Dana

Sure, why not? I assume he means the predictions at the end; as they’re intended to look up to a century in advance, not much can happen in ten years to throw them off.

Of course, the first one (that Republicans would find they like governing) looks the worst. It’s somewhat baffling why the Repubs get crazier and crazier. Traditional political science says that two-party winner-take-all systems produce fairly similar moderate parties, and that’s what we had for most of the 20th century. But now the GOP goes more off the deep end every year.

The usual cure is to lose elections, but it takes several in a row. But the problem today is that the voters have short memories. The Republicans did their best to destroy the country, and lost accordingly in ’06 and ’08. Two years wasn’t enough to clean up their mess, but the voters gave them another chance in 2010. Maybe this cycle will continue for awhile; but demographics are against them. The Republicans can’t keep alienating women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, lesbians, and the young forever.

Your friend’s list is pretty miscellaneous, but let’s go over it briefly:

Subprime mortgages: The damage done by deregulation is basically over. We don’t have the housing bubble as a problem any more; our problem is the ongoing recession. And half the country doesn’t want the recession to end, because omigod Obama would be reelected.

Bush’s TARP: no one likes the idea of a bailout, but this one saved us from a depression and the taxpayers got their money back. The alternatives would have been worse.

The euro crisis is mostly notable for showing that the European right is just as self-destructive as the American right. Large currency unions are a bad idea; ours only works because we have an ongoing commitment to support weaker regions. The Europeans will either have to give it up, or actually decide to make it work (by making the same kind of commitment). Chances are they’ll do neither by November.

Staggering debt: nonsense. We’re in a liquidity trap; government debt is not the problem. And debt has been far higher (as a percentage of GNP) before.

Aging populations: for the US, there’s no reason we should face a problem anytime soon. Japan does, because it foolishly doesn’t allow much immigration. We can allow as much as we like.

If you look at the daily paper, the world is always going to hell. If you look at the history books, things have been steadily improving for two centuries. Sometimes we rationally avoid a crisis (the Horse Poop Apocalypse one might have expected in 1900 was averted by the invention of the automobile). Sometimes we make the worst choices, have the catastrophe, and learn our lesson.

On the other hand, since I wrote that essay, I’ve also written an sf novel whose future history assumes that in the next century we keep making the wrong decisions and cause a global collapse. So my sanguinity has its limits.